Animation has historically been an arduous and time-intensive process, often involving hundreds of full-time animators and expensive, dedicated machinery. The widespread availability of computer systems has alleviated some of this tedium for 2D animation and has introduced the more automated processes of 3D animation. However, the process pipelines to create, e.g., a feature length movie, remain expensive, complicated and for the most part inaccessible to small teams, particularly small teams seeking to generate considerable content in a short space of time.
Furthermore, animated experiences and sequences have traditionally been distributed in isolated bundles. Feature films are released in theater or in DVD and video games are distributed in isolated installments with large lag times between successive patches and updates. A developer seeking to push large amounts of content to a user on a regular basis and to modify and update that content, must contend with tools designed for slower and larger projects.
If one desires to distribute interactive animated features to user devices across the internet, a considerable amount of dialogue and animation information may need to be generated and packaged in a form differing considerably from traditional distribution methods. Given this amount of content and the small size of many user devices (iPADs®, iPhones®, etc.), as well as the small amount of bandwidth often available, the traditional approach to content generation is generally unsuitable. Accordingly, there is a need for content generation systems and methods that efficiently generate large quantities of content able to be implemented on remote devices.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the logic and process steps illustrated in the various flow diagrams discussed below may be altered in a variety of ways. For example, the order of the logic may be rearranged, substeps may be performed in parallel, illustrated logic may be omitted, other logic may be included, etc. One will recognize that certain steps may be consolidated into a single step and that actions represented by a single step may be alternatively represented as a collection of substeps. The figures are designed to make the disclosed concepts more comprehensible to a human reader. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that actual data structures used to store this information may differ from the figures and/or tables shown, in that they, for example, may be organized in a different manner; may contain more or less information than shown; may be compressed and/or encrypted; etc.